aprstar

With this simple python program you can monitor your Allstar or pi-star health using APRS metrics. You can see an example of the metrics logged by my allstar node. https://aprs.fi/telemetry/a/W6BSD-7

The metrics are temperature, CPU load average, and Available memory.

Installation (Pi-Star)

This program can run using either python3 or python2. As of today, the hamvoip allstar image, uses an older version of Linux and the default python is 2.7, this is why this program uses python 2.7.

I have try to limit the number of dependencies in other python package but there is still a few that need to be installed.

The following instructions for installing aprstar on Pi-Star.

On the Pi-Star image a very minimal version of python has been installed make sure the main python libraries are installed by running the following commands.

# rpi-rw
# sudo apt update
# sudo apt install python-pip -y

The following packages are the 2 dependencies used by aprstar. They can be installed using the command pip.

# sudo pip install ConfigParser
# sudo pip install aprslib

The module configparser should be already installed but I have found some instances where it is not.

Installing aprstar.py

# sudo cp aprstar.py /usr/local/bin/aprstar
# sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/aprstar

Installing the aprstar service

# sudo cp aprstar.service /lib/systemd/system/aprstar.service
# sudo chmod 0644 /lib/systemd/system/aprstar.service

Configurations

Create the file /etc/aprstar.conf, using your favorite editor. For example:

# sudo nano /etc/aprstar.conf

And add the following lines, replacing N0CALL with your call sign. The 1 is the id of your device. If you have several device, replace the 1 by your device number.

[APRS]
call: N0CALL-1

Use Ctrl-X to save and exit.

This is the minimal configuration. You can also add the keywords longitude and latitude, with the lat, lon in decimal form. If you don't indicate the position the program will use the ip-address to determine where you are.

Starting the service

# sudo systemctl enable aprstar.service
# sudo systemctl start aprstar.service

You can now run the status command to see if everything is running smoothly and you have no errors.

# sudo systemctl status aprstar.service

Example

This is the screenshoot from aprs.fi, of the temperature and load average from an Allstar node.